I’m interested in pragmatics and semantics and my research combines theoretical and experimental approaches. I’ve focused on the following research topics:

  • Information and discourse structure
  • Non-truth conditional meaning
  • Anaphora production and interpretation

I’m a member of the officially-recognized Formal Linguistics Group (GLIF) and of UPF's larger Linguistics Research Unit (UR-LING).

I’m the PI of the project EXPEDIS and I’m also involved with the project Valence Asymmetries.

EXPEDIS (PID2021-122779NB-I00) is concerned with the study of discourse structure experimentally. When humans communicate, we do so through discourses, which encompass both written texts and oral speeches, both monologues and dialogues (or multilogues). Yet the scientific study of language has traditionally focused at the sentence level (both from the syntactic and semantic point of view) and has paid less attention to this upper-level structure. However, in order to understand how we communicate and interpret meaning, it is crucial to understand how discourse is structured. The general goal of EXPEDIS is to gain a better understanding of discourse structure using experimental techniques. We will examine four different case studies concerning different phenomena at the semantics/pragmatics interface which can be informed from a better understanding of discourse structure and inform it as well. EXPEDIS will decidedly deploy experimental methodologies used in the field of experimental pragmatics, which is becoming fundamental to understand the underpinnings of language and its relationship to the human mind.

From 2019 to 2021, I was the PI of the project QUDLE (PGC2018-094029-A-I00), whose goal was to understand the linguistic effects of The Question Under Discussion and its Linguistic Effects. An extended view in semantics/pragmatics is that discourse can be explained as a question-answering strategy. That is, any utterance in a discourse (be it a dialogue or a monologue) can be thought of addressing a Question Under Discussion (QUD, henceforth). This is obvious when the QUD is explicit, as in a question-answer pair. Furthermore, even in absence of an explicit question, it is useful to assume that any utterance addresses a potentially implicit QUD. QUDs play a central role in explaining the dynamics of dialogue and the rhetorical organization of discourse. For instance, the QUD model of Ginzburg (1994, 2012) has been applied to provide detailed analyses of dialogue moves, such as fragment utterances or clarification questions. Particularly influential is the proposal in Roberts (1996), who models discourse structure as stacks of QUDs, which participants aim to resolve. Simultaneously, she ties the notion of the QUD to the notion of focus, which in turn has inspired important work in information structure, such as the work on contrastive topics or on focus particles. Apart from information structure, other very fruitful areas of application of QUD models have been the so-called projective meanings and studies on rhetorical relations.

Other projects I’ve been involved with:

  • 2016-2019: Member (part-time) of the project ‘Correspondences between contextual resources and sentential information structure' (PI: Enric Vallduví).
  • 2016-2019: Member (part-time) of the project ‘On the interaction between Meaning Types: compositionality and discourse structure' (PI: Elena Castroviejo).
  • 2012-1013: PI of the project ‘An experimentally-based theory of direct and indirect denial’, funded by the Euro-XPrag project (European Science Foundation).
  • 2012-2014: Member (part-time) of the project ‘Compositionality of meaning and semantic operations at the syntax-semantics and grammar-cognition interface' (PI: Maria Teresa Espinal).
  • 2012-2014: Member (part-time) of the project ‘The syntax and information structure of unbounded dependencies' (PI: Àlex Alsina).
  • 2005-2008: External contributor of the project ‘Non-canonical constructions in the oral discourse' (PI: Enric Vallduví).